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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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Personally twitter seems to be doing better than ever for me. I never understand why people complain about it. My user experience is better than ever.

The rebranding I don’t get but Musks always wins so I assume he knows what is doing. He’s basically god and his vision always ends up happening.

He’s basically god and his vision always ends up happening.

Hah, sometimes I feel this way too. It's so bizarre how the public discourse can cover him so negatively while he's done so many incredible, seemingly impossible things.

Literally two of the most important technology innovations of this century, cheap space travel and electrical motors, have been shoved forward by him. Not only that, but generative AI, probably the most important invention ever was created by OpenAI, which he founded as well! It is literally insane how effective he is. Like Midas, everything he touches turns to gold. (Except the Boring Company, we don't talk about that one.)

When I read Tim Urban's series on SpaceX, it really opened my eyes to how utterly wrong, and not just wrong but totally out of touch with reality the mainstream media could be. That was my intro into rationalist spaces more generally.

This is also my experience.

Not only do I find myself using the app substantially more, but spam seems to have mostly gone away, the service is fast and responsive, I don't think I've ever had an error/app crash that people talk about, and I'm really excited about the new features that they've shipped.

I've already got friends trying to pull me to twitter messenger away from facebook/signal/etc. that we're using.

It just seems like...yeah, actually, he really is doing it, and the people insisting that somehow twitter is falling apart are just coping.

Twitter is markedly worse for me. Setting aside the app frequently crashing or buffering endlessly, there's a very noticeable increase in the amount of crypto spam beneath comments, and every day I have to block some new porn bot that's decided to follow me. The basic functionality of the site has been compromised, but as long as journalists and government institutions are still using Twitter, it'll keep standing. I'm bearish on a competitor site taking over - if Threads (terrible name) can't do it even after importing users from Instagram, I don't see what will.

Seconded. I mainly use it for sports and Ukraine news. Sports has gotten markedly worse, with replies full of nft scams and weird knockoff jersey websites to the point of uselessness. Ukraine news has gotten moderately worse for info, but I will note that the annoying "Ukraine is falling apart" spam is probably showing up because of reduced censorship. I use it less and less.

A lot of people are just mad that Musk controls their favorite toy.

This is responsible for a lot of it, but these single-sentence own comments don't add much value imo. People have made the case for this at length elsewhere

Cool.

Single-sentence comments are not good, single-word comments are bad. More effort and less passive-aggressiveness, please.

I think it really is just this. All claims that twitter is dying are attempted consensus building as far as I can tell. I had a discussion on a game subreddit about it. Someone noticed that interaction on a recent social media campaign was less than before and attributed it to twitter "dying". I pointed out that most of the interaction comes from the Japanese community and they would have no reason at all to care about Americans throwing a shit-fit over the rocket man.

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